Monday, February 27, 2006

Editing Tedium

I seriously need to finish this album before my social life becomes non-existent.

How do I spend Saturday night? Cutting every single snare drum out of the sample loop drum track and substituting each one with a strategic hand clap. This is just one of the great adventures in audio editing no-one bothered to warn me about. These ugly tasks that no-one wants to do, I always end up volunteering for. Inspired by the hand claps of the Clash's 'Rock the Casbah,' we thought this last minute change would propel the groove along a bit more. Hopefully it'll bring up the the brightness and clarity of the mix. The old snare had a gnarly edge that seemed to slow the whole song down.

If I thought about it properly from the outset, I would have done the whole thing differently. Usually when I get the initial ideas down, I tend to be sloppy. I throw lots of unrelated things together and layer like crazy. Then when it comes to mixing, there is often a concentration of parts in the mid and low range frequencies. It ends up sounding murky and cluttered. So now we're stripping it all back, and I'm chastising myself for being such a messy programmer.

The winner of the week was Om-synth, which can be downloaded from http://www.nongnu.org/om-synth

It's a bit like Reaktor - a patchable synthesiser that allows you to tweak and craft a sound to the minutest detail. Nick came up with a great lo-fi fuzz-like guitar sound that helped tie all the sounds together in the chorus. Thanks to Dave Robillard for developing this handy tool.

posted by deprogram @ 10:47 PM